In last week's episode, we talked about minions
and asked whether or not posting minion
hate counts as advertising.
And we're going to talk about your thoughts regarding that.
But before we do, I want to clarify
two things I said in the comment response video
to the three laws of the internet episode.
And this is not going to be something
that we do a lot because otherwise, we'll
get stuck in a rabbit hole of commenting on comments
and responding to responses and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But these are things that I think are important to address.
The existence of inequality is not a matter of opinion.
Inequality, including that between men and women, exists.
It is a fact.
The work we do an Idea Channel, however, will occasionally
necessitate interacting with ideas or people who believe
the opposite to be true.
It's my responsibility to interact
with those people and those ideas
in as friendly a way as possible and to not dismiss
them as crazy or ridiculous, out of hand,
because that's not how conversations begin.
That's how flights begin.
And for better or worse, Idea Channel is not about fights,
it's about conversation.
So those are clarification that I wanted to make.
And thank you for listening to them,
and I'm going to try really hard in the next comment response
video to not clarify these clarifications
because then we will officially have fallen down a rabbit hole.
So, yeah.
Let's talk about minions.
Two devoted people on the sub ride and everybody
else who begrudgingly heard me out on this one
because they were so, so sick of minions, thank you.
I appreciate it.
I really do appreciate it.
And I am flattered that you would
suffer through minions for me.
That's like, birthday present level good.
So thank you.
Kairi oblivious and a bunch of other people
pointed out that this is also maybe
exactly what happened with My Little Pony.
That there was an initial spark of interest, a huge backlash,
and then a much larger spark of Interest.
And this rings true for me.
That was exactly my experience with My Little Pony.
That I saw people getting very, very upset about it and then
had to, sort of, go and find out what it is.
It makes me wonder what like, how many
shows have such a great success in light of,
you know, because of some kind of backlash that has occurred.
And it's, yeah, it's got to be a small number, right?
It has to be.
Jedibot5 points out that minion hate can reach such a fever
pitch that the opposite effect kind of occurs,
that you could end up hating the hate of the thing more
than the thing itself, which just makes
me think of the bizarre alternate universe
where the direct experience of minions
is somehow preferable to people complaining about them.
And also, then I have a shock of recognition
that that might be the world we live in.
I need to lie down.
Conkshellthegeek brings up the related concept
of the Streisand effect, which says basically
that the more you attempt to keep something under wraps
or to keep it from spreading, the more it
is essentially guaranteed that that will happen.
And I wonder how this relates to the posting of minion hate
because, you know, like, is minion hate
about just sort of having this cathartic fist-banging,
flailing experience of just posting your hate?
Or does it have this aim of actually wanting
to keep people from going to go see the movies
and thus invoking the Streisand effect?
Um, I don't know.
I get the sense that it's more just straight complaining.
But maybe I'm wrong.
(IN ANNOUNCER'S VOICE)In theaters now.
Readcomplain and a couple other people
brought up the really interesting
and I think important point of applying
a lot of this to social issues.
Like, can you talk about things like racism or sexism
without in some way advertising them?
And I think that there are-- there are levels to this,
right?
The first level is it's probably going
to be hard to find someone-- you're
going to have a hard time finding someone who doesn't
know what racism or sexism is.
But you might come across someone
who understands it in a general sense
but not in a specific sense.
And I think in that case, it is maybe
imperative to talk to that person about the larger
sort of general ideas or place that those things have
in society.
And that to unveil those things to them
is not an advertisement so much, as it is a warning.
I guess it depends on how you put it together.
But then the third part of it is I
think, the sort of more nuanced and tricky part, which
is talking about things like racism and sexism
and the large ideas and their general operation
without in some way advertising or enlarging
the platform of the people or organizations
that further or support things like racism and sexism.
And I think that that is a more tricky and nuanced situation.
But also, I think one that's really important to try to do.
Not in all situations, but in a lot of them.
Lilly Smith-Mullen makes what I think
is a really apt comparison between minions and Shrek,
both of which occupy not similar,
but I think, related sort of, I don't know,
internet meme zones.
And it makes me wonder about the kind of ironic love of Shrek
that exists or has come to light as an affect of its popularity
in internet culture and the hatred of minions
that has happened as a result of it's ubiquity.
Sometimes related, I think to, you know,
internet means but sometimes related just to the fact
that it's on all of these products everywhere.
And I wonder whether or not there
is going to be ever a time where minion memeing, memetizing
turns into the kind of celebratory thing
that we tend to see with Shrek.
You see, I think you see it a little bit now.
Like I see a lot of minion and Sonic memes,
which I don't recommend looking for them.
But they do seem more celebratory
than a lot of the other minion memes.
And so who knows?
It could be on the horizon.
That could be our future.
And with that, this comment is ogre.
Fixsedys, I don't, I'm not sure that it's quite that bad yet.
Like, the last time I was in Target I saw,
it was the Star Wars, Angry Birds,
Jenga which is too many things at once.
And I don't-- as far as I know, minions aren't there--
aren't there yet.
It's not that level of infernal merchandising,
but maybe we'll get there.
Let's see.
So, like maybe, MacGyver minions monopoly.
I would probably play that.
Lemonandcupcakes talks about their experience
working on an author's message board
and how when haters show up to hate the people who
love the thing that is being criticized
get to develop counterarguments and to sort of reinforce
the things are great or amazing about the brand or the message
of the media being discussed.
And while I can see how this could be true about minions,
I wonder what the counterargument to minion hate
would be, because I have honestly not seen a lot of it.
Is it that it's the point that they are everywhere?
Even in the Idea Channel comment thread, which is normally
a place of great discussion where people have differing
viewpoints and talk about them, there's not a lot,
there was not a lot of minion support.
And so it makes me wonder what the, yeah, like,
what the minion front sort of holds as its banner.
I don't know.
Chris McMahon brings up the really great and important
point of earned media impressions
as being part of the grand marketing campaign surrounding
any piece of major media that advertising is one thing
but that PR and marketing comprised
a whole other set of things.
And that EMIs, as they are called,
is a kind of thing where if something
is shareable in some way, then you earn an impression
based upon its shareability.
And this is definitely an important part
of this conversation that we didn't discuss.
So thank you for bringing this up, Chris.
This is a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others in doobly doo.
Amy Kinsmen brings up a really great idea
that I think doesn't really apply so much to minions
but does apply to a lot of other popular culture, which
is hate about a certain piece of media posted
by one group of people can work as advertisement
for another group of people.
And the example here is Mad Max Fury Road,
which a group of people posted about how
it was not an action film.
And that was related to the agency or importance given
to the female characters and that Mad Max wasn't
the actual main character.
This is a problem.
And for a lot of other people, myself included,
that was a selling point that it made it
a more interesting and engaging story.
It made it a little bit more unique.
And so those group of people seeing the hate posted
by this group of people ended up going
to see the movie in droves.
And I think that this is a really great way
of talking about the relationship between hate being
posted on the internet acting as advertisement for the thing
being hated upon.
So, Yeah.
This is a great comment.
Bigshack, you may or may not be very
happy to learn that clicking the thumbs down
is actually still good for the video.
Turns out the best thing you could
do if you don't like a YouTube video is nothing.
How convenient.